Galerie Grand Siècle is about to present Chen Mei-Tsen’s latest oil painting series Paradise. She is a Taiwanese artist living in France. After nearly four years, her works will be shown in Taiwan again. Through landscape-formed Paradise, she will reveal the city maps projected from her memories in front of the audience.

In Paradise series, Chen Mei-Tsen used a metaphor for cities as a tree’s extensive twisted branches to depict city this "reinvented earthly paradise". City is a well-systemized organic cocoon and an organization that kept widening and transforming in psychology and its composition. Each of the series represent a city, including her birth place Taipei, current home Paris and the metropolises she ever traveled by, HK, Singapore, Tokyo, Beijing, London, Berlin, Madrid, Montreal and Stockholm. Paradise is mainly consisted of trunks of blood-and-flesh texture, tentacled branches and spiderwebbed city streets. The three keynote colors skin color, red and violet symbolized human skin, arteries, veins and neural system.

Chen Mei-Tsen regarded painting as an access to foreignness. Painting—let body links to neural system and  up to brain emotion and thoughts—enables people to revisit the foreign land. Concerning to this series, Mei-Tsen said" Maybe in my Paradise, I am the invisible spider who weaves the web, builds the link and waits for something to happen, but I feel more like the petty insect who is captured by the fragile web in our moving world."

Reinvented Earthly Paradise— Between Taipei and Paris is originated from the deep self-questions and the answer to those questions: "Where and when she is”, "what her artist perspectives are", "Why she needs to continue creating artworks", and "How she defines cultural identity in a foreign land”

*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and Galerie Grand Siecle